Friday, July 26, 2013

Camping - Author Style Part 3

As week four of July CampNaNoWriMo comes to an end I am now at 106,515 words. Yeah, I've hit six digits. I'm just happy to be over 75K because that's still been my least productive word count this year. Also I'm about 200K away from hitting a million words.

I should be happy, right? Well I am and I'm not. I mean: YAY A MILLION WORDS! Urg: I've got to edit all that. Double urg on knowing that it's highly unlikely (at this point) that anyone is going to see those words.

It would be wonderful to say I've written a million words (about eight stories worth) that people will read but, I'm self-published and suck at promoting. So it's highly unlikely that anyone will see those million words.

It's disappointing, yes, but it won't stop me from writing. Why? Well, I'm a writer. I've said it lots of times in this blog, to my friends and to people on the street (ha): writing for me is like breathing. I can't go too long without it or I go crazy.

Anyway, enough with the self-pity "blah blah can't promote blah woe is me" thing. This is CampNaNoWriMo. This is FUN. And it is fun because hey, writing is fun.

At this point in my novel I've killed over 500,000 people. I worried so badly about my plot that I went to the NaNo forums to get help fixing it. It got fixed. I planned out the rest of the novel and now I'm stalling again. Why? Because I'm about to kill off important characters.

I've realized that this thing is kind of like Basilisk (my Anime Freak is showing, shh) in that EVERYONE DIES. Don't get too attached because hey, they're all going to freaking die at the end.

It's actually kind of needed that everyone dies though. I mean the ending is not supposed to be happy at all and Earth loses. The funny thing is that when I write these character deaths I don't think I'm going to be too upset with one. This is going to be really weird because I'm always attached to my characters and killing them hurts.

Somehow one of my characters is kind of, well, not flat but I didn't really attach to him for some reason. I haven't had as much fun as I do writing this novel and I'm not sure why. The premise is great, the plot makes sense (now) and well, things are progressing smoothly.

But for some reason my characters haven't grabbed the plot, ripped it apart and done their own thing. None of the other mains have taken over from the biggest main and none of them look to be planning to. It's like they're all "okay, fine, write about us. We're just going to sit here."

It bothers me because this hasn't happened before. I always relate to at least one character but nada. Either I'm losing my touch of I've got a serious case of some form of weird writer's block where I can still write but it's just not the same.

Maybe I'm so disjointed from my characters because I know I'm about to put them all through Hell. Maybe I'll actually shed a tear when I write their deaths. I'm probably going crazy-er.

It likely doesn't help that it's like 9PM and I'm running on five hours (or less) of sleep. Regardless I plan to finish this thing by Sunday. That's two days to write four chapters and an epilogue. I do have to admit, I am looking forward to writing a scene where a character goes completely bonkers. It'll be fun.

As for now, I'm going to look over some drafts, laugh at a few things and fall asleep hugging my laptop because it's nice and warm. Until next time: Aliens are bad. Yes.

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